


Cascade

by turntechGodtier



Category: Homestuck
Genre: End of Act Five, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-03
Updated: 2011-12-03
Packaged: 2017-10-26 20:33:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/287552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/turntechGodtier/pseuds/turntechGodtier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You have one shot at this.  One shot to rise above it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cascade

She looks at you. You can see in her eyes the fear, the hope, the despair. It’s that last one that makes your heart wrench in a way that very nearly chokes you, breaks your cool-kid facade to reveal the thirteen-year-old boy you still somehow are deep down inside. You know the look on your face is identical, because she’s your twin. The look is somehow so very familiar, as though someone else had given it to you not too long ago. You brush the feeling of déjà vu aside. Soon enough, it won’t matter.

Forty-three seconds. She’s still looking at you, and you can’t decide if you want the time to speed up or slow down.  _‘What if this doesn’t work?’_  she seems to be asking.  _‘If we fail…’_  She’s too far away to take her hand, to try and assure her everything will be okay. You don’t know if it will be, anyway.

Sixteen seconds. You remembered when John got the beta in his mailbox. It seemed so long ago. It felt as though years had passed, leaving you feeling much older than you actually were, but in reality, it was maybe a month, perhaps two in the way Earth measured time. It hurt, knowing that this game wasn’t about saving your own world, but losing it, losing everything you’d known for years, never to return to it. You doubted anything would ever be the same after playing this “game,” anyway. You’d looked yourself in the eyes, and you knew something like that changed a person until the day he died.

Which, if the timer was right, would be in about four seconds. You open your mouth to speak, unsure what you’re going to say. Three seconds. Your heart aches. She was your sister, for all these years, and it’s only now that you’re realizing you kind of always knew. Two seconds. Her name falls off your mouth, just as yours comes floating from her throat. One second. It’s an odd comfort, knowing your name was spoken right before you were about to die, the cold, colored stone beneath your feet little comfort in what you were about to do.

In theory, this will save both your lives. In theory, you’ll walk away from this not just unscathed, but stronger, as close to immortality as one can achieve by dying. You never had much of a head for science, though. Theories always sounded so unsure, not like the Laws of Gravity, or the constants that were the stars and the moon. The last second seems to be drawing on forever, your hand tight around the Deringer. The bifurcated universes spread their eerie glow across you both, and the positioning is oddly appropriate: red splashed like blood across you, and blue like tears on her, mixing sickly with the blackness from the Tumor.

The timer hits zero and everything goes white for a split-second before going black.

When you awake, the first thing you can think is that you failed. Doomed forever now to be white-eyed ghosts, constant reminders of the fact that it all went wrong. But the Deringer is solid in your white-knuckled fist, and unless you’re very much mistaken, you can almost hear music floating in as you rise. You haven’t failed. You’ve Ascended, no longer a boy or a ghost, but a God. You can sense her next to you, her own power pressing against yours in something torn between instinctive combat and familiar playfulness, a state of being that had always been something of a calling card for her.

The adrenaline of success, of knowing what you’ve both been through, of what you’ve done and become, begins coursing through you, the telltale hood cool against your flushed skin. They’re waiting for you. You can see them, just barely on the horizon. She can probably see them better, but no matter. Seeing is not your calling in all of this. They greet you like old friends, old enemies, kindred spirits in your suffering and joy. You’ve succeeded, yes. But what lies before you now, you couldn’t say.


End file.
